Now shop in English, Hindi or Telugu on Snapdeal

Rohit Bansal founded e-commerce platform becomes first of its kind site to offer services in 12 Indic languages.

Starting today, Snapdeal’s user interface on the mobile will be available in Hindi and Telegu. By January 26 next year, Snapdeal will be available in the 12 Indic languages(Snapdeal)

Snapdeal on mobile is now accessible to more users that ever before. The Rohit Bansal founded e-commerce firm on Tuesday said that it was integrating 12 Indic languages to its website making it easy for consumers to read product descriptions and making a buying choice. Snapdeal will also provide the multilingual service while making payments and tracking the order.

“Starting today, Snapdeal’s user interface on the mobile will be available in Hindi and Telegu. By January 26 next year, Snapdeal will be available in the 12 Indic languages,” Rohit Bansal, co-founder and COO of Snapdeal, told Hindustan Times.

The twelve Indic languages, which includes Hindi, Telegu, Gujrati, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Assamese and Punjabi, will also push Snapdeal in the e-commerce space as neither rivals Flipkart nor Amazon provides services in these many languages.

“We are catering to 270 million internet users in India and nearly 140 of them do not understand English. Hence, we thought that we will make it easy and connect to the rest 130 million people,” Bansal said.

According to Bansal, a significant percentage of the user base opts for Hindi and other vernacular languages to speak or interact with Snapdeal via customer care. Which makes it seem that they are more comfortable with their native languages.

The e-commerce platform will also let users post reviews in these 12 languages so that other users benefit from it and content grows organically for the site.

Bansal added that the multilingual service is built on a lighter version of the site called Snaplite (Snapdeal’s website for mobile browser) which is 85% lighter and consumes less bandwidth.

The addition of all these moves assumes significance as India still remains a price sensitive market in terms of mobile data. This will encourage more traffic from smaller cities.

“Snapdeal’s offering of 12 Indic languages are built on the basis of feedback received from both buyers and sellers. A team of 45 people over the period of six months have developed this capability by going through three phases -- translations, trans-literation and a grammar check engine,” Bansal said explaining the technology.

The domestic e-commerce player expects to see an uptick in revenue after the launch of the technology whose full deployment will be completed by January 26 next year.

“Our market size just increased by 100%,” Bansal said adding that the company was not planning a separate light version of its app. Recently, Facebook had launched a lite version of its app to reach more users in low-bandwidth and poorly-connected areas. “The aim was to give users a better experience on 2G networks,” the social networking site had said during the launch of the app.

Snapdeal, which also owns a digital wallet service called FreeCharge, is expecting to see more traction in their wallet business too with the launch of the multilingual platform although Bansal didn’t comment on the wallet’s language services.